Mastering Machine Learning Algorithms

Self-organizing maps

Self-organizing maps (SOMs) have been proposed by Willshaw and Von Der Malsburg (Willshaw D. J., Von Der Malsburg C., How patterned neural connections can be set up by self-organization, Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, B/194, N. 1117) to model different neurobiological phenomena observed in animals. In particular, they discovered that some areas of the brain develop structures with different areas, each of them with a high sensitivity for a specific input pattern. The process behind such a behavior is quite different from what we have discussed up until now, because it's based on competition among neural units based on a principle called winner-takes-all. During the training period, all the units are excited ...